Ilulissat
- the town of the Ice Fiord
    

Ilulissat, the third largest municipality in Greenland, is one of Greenland's growth areas and the entrance point for traffic to Disko Bay and the whole of Northern Greenland.
Since the opening of the airport for fixed-winged aircrafts in 1984, the town has also become a business centre.
Fishing for shrimp and halibut itself, and the work generated by the two fish factories, have been the main attraction for a number of new service trades in the town.

The Ice Fiord
Ilulissat is known as the town by the Ice-fiord.
The ice-floe there produces more than 20 million tons of ice per day, which makes it by far the most productive ice-floe in the Northern hemisphere. The ice-front itself is some 45 kilometers inside Ilulissat Ice-fiord, where the glacier from the Greenland inland ice moves at a speed of 23 meters per day. The ice often starts it's journey with a thundering crash as it falls into the fiord. The huge icebergs are pushed by one another out through the fiord and right outside the town the largest of them get stuck on the sea bottom until the flood tide lifts them and sends them off to sea - on their final voyage.

The town
The population of the Ilulissat municipality is approx. 4,700, of whom 4,300 live in the town of Ilulissat and the rest in four small settlements.
The Danish name for the town is Jakobshavn after it's founder Jakob Severin (1691-1753). The Greenlandic name Ilulissat means Icebergs.
Local history dates much further back then the founding of Jakobshavn. The settlement Sermermiut , situated a few kilometers southwest of the town beside the mouth of the Ilulissat Ice-fiord, was inhabited as early as 2,000 years B.C.
The famous arctic explorer Knud Rasmussen was born in Ilulissat in 1879. The house where he grew up today is the Knud Rasmussen Museum. Also the arctic explorer Jørgen Brøndlund was born in Ilulissat, in 1877, and grew up together with Knud Rasmussen.



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A brief introduction to the town of Ilulissat

Please contact us for further details and booking

Ilulissat Tourist Service
P.O. Box 272
DK-3952 Ilulissat
Greenland

E-mail: ilulissat.tourist@greennet.gl
Phone: +299 4 43 22
Fax: +299 4 39 33

When calling from abroad, please note
the time difference to Greenland


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